The invention relates to fault isolation.
A computer system includes devices, which may fail without warning. Depending upon the type of failure and the particular device which failed, the computer system can respond in one of several ways. If the failure prevents the computer from functioning properly (such as a fan failure or a multi-bit uncorrectable data error), then a non-maskable interrupt (NMI) or system management interrupt (SMI) can be generated to shut the computer system down. If a correctable error occurred, such as a correctable single-bit data error, then the computer system can be notified of the failure but computer operation is not otherwise interrupted.